Power outage closes Rio Rancho voting site, prompts alternate locations

A power outage shut down voting at Puesta Del Sol Elementary School on Southern Boulevard in Rio Rancho on June 2, forcing Sandoval County voters to reroute to two alternate polling places during a crowded primary election day.

The Sandoval County Clerk’s Office told voters to leave the closed school site and head instead to the Southern Sandoval County Arroyo Flood Control Authority building, 1040 Commercial Drive SE, or Joe Harris Elementary School, 2100 10th Street SE, both in Rio Rancho. The outage hit one of the city’s neighborhood voting locations just as residents were trying to cast ballots in a contest that depended on fast communication and clear directions from county election staff.

For voters assigned to Puesta Del Sol Elementary, the disruption meant a sudden change in routine. People who had planned to vote near home, near work, or at a familiar school entrance had to adjust on the fly and find another site before polls closed for the day. Sandoval County’s election-day voting hours ran from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., giving voters a window to get to another location, but the outage still interrupted the normal flow of the day.

The timing mattered because New Mexico’s 2026 primary was the state’s first semi-open primary, allowing registered independents to choose a major-party ballot without changing affiliation. On June 1, New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver said more than 181,900 voters had already cast ballots statewide, including more than 18,500 voters not registered with a qualified political party. That made every local polling-place disruption more sensitive, especially in a county where election officials said they expected turnout to break the record set in the 2016 presidential primary.

By early Tuesday afternoon, Chief Deputy County Clerk Joey Dominguez said Sandoval County had already received more than 21,000 ballots, underscoring how heavily used the county’s election system had become by the time the outage hit. Puesta Del Sol Elementary had been listed among the county’s election-day polling locations before the power failure, showing how quickly a routine site list can change once a school loses power.

The closure put a spotlight on election reliability in Rio Rancho, where a single polling place can serve a large share of voters. In this case, the county’s ability to shift voters to two nearby locations kept the election moving, but the outage also showed how much Sandoval County now depends on backup power, rapid notice, and clear site lists when turnout is high and the line between inconvenience and discouragement can be thin.